Report: China pushing banks to abandon American hardware

There's a growing undercurrent of tension between the US and China because both countries think the other is trying to hack them. They're both probably right, but China seems to be taking some concrete fiscal steps to make its displeasure known. According to a new report from Bloomberg (and the usual spate of unnamed sources), the Chinese government is quietly asking the country's big banks to give up their IBM servers in favor of some homegrown hardware.

The big concern? The security and integrity of China's financial systems. IBM may be ruing the move behind closed doors, but seeing China cut its reliance on foreign tech only seems natural considering the events of the past weeks. Remember: the US Department of Justice charged five officials from the People's Liberation Army of China with hacking into American companies to steal trade secrets earlier this month. What's more, leaks published in Glenn Greenwald's new book confirmed that the NSA can and has intercepted hardware to trick it out with surveillance measures before passing it onto the intended customer. Throw some stern rebukes from a new Chinese government agency report (among other things, it accuses the US of putting "global cyber-security under threat") and it's no surprise that things are getting so chilly. This isn't the first time that the Chinese government has come down hard on US-made tech, either: just a few weeks ago, Windows 8 became verboten on government computers there.